Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday October 17, 2010 @08:15AM
from the open-and-shut-investigation dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Business Software Alliance is trying to kill open standards. Free Software Foundation Europe has gotten hold of a letter in which the BSA tries to bully the European Commission into removing the last traces of support for open standards from its IT recommendations to the public sector. FSFE published the BSA's letter (PDF), and picked apart its arguments one by one."

The documents the BSA is complaining about apparently give preference to "open specifications" that don't have the complication of software patents, that are freely implementable without licensing fees, etc. They aren't saying that software or standards with software patents and licensing fees are excluded from competition, only that the open ones are given preference over ones that aren't.

It's all about saving money and avoiding unpleasant surprises (patent trolls) after a standard is deployed. What the hell is wrong with that?

The other part is that open standards (and open source) have significant advantages: no vendor lock-in, archived material remains accessible (even if you have to write a converter to a newer format - which may well be worth it for government archives), competition between vendors means lower prices (free markets always work better for the buyer), etc.

significant advantages: no vendor lock-in, archived material remains accessible (even if you have to write a converter to a newer format - which may well be worth it for government archives)

s / government / large/i.e. if you've got a large (however you define the length of that piece of elastic string in a variable gravity field) archive, then it may become worthwhile to write your own converter.But on the other hand, if the file format "from" and/ or "to" are popular and Open, then there's likely a conver

In the corporate world, maybe (depends on how stupid the pointy haired bosses are). In the government, against all the lobbyists? No way. Big software corporations will do anything to get governments locked in vendor lock-in. It takes some time to realize how special the "special offer" really is and government agencies either don't have experts who know that beforehand or don't listen to them. And don't forget that locking the government in proprietary system also means locking half of the country's market as well because a lot of companies will be forced to use the system by the government.

The international association of patent trolls takes offense at any legal moves that complicates the business of their clients.

Really? I always though it took offense at the moves which simplified the business of their non-clients.

Generally speaking, big companies love flat per-company costs, since relative to size it hurts small companies the most. Second to that, they love fixed percentage-of-revenue costs, since it amplifies the per-company flat costs (they're bigger relative to the remaining funds). Searching for patents and getting licensed where appropriate seems to be one of these (or a mixture of the two).

The only difference between an open and a closes specification is that the you usually have to pay patent license fees to implement a closed one. Whether a specification is closed or not does not protect you from patent trolls.

Fortunately, since the Lisbon Treaty came into effect, circumvention of (elected) MEPs by (unelected) Commissioners is not so easy. The European Parliament handed the Commission its ass on a couple of major points very quickly to educate them about the changed situation. If memory serves, ACTA is up this coming week, so it will be interesting to see whether it happens again (though it sounds like most of the really bad parts of that have effectively already been dropped as the by-the-back-door politics failed).

As for software patents, the situation is not as straightforward in Europe as some people describe. There is no Europe-wide formal recognition of "software patents" as some sort of category, but numerous patents have been granted by European nations that you or I might describe as "software patents", and as with most such things, whether they are deemed enforceable isn't something we'll know until the court case comes up, and the potential chilling effects are there anyway.

The members of the comission are elected by the EU council, which is composed by prime ministers of member states. So they aren't random burocrats. However I would prefer too if they would be elected by EU MPs.

and proprietary software protects them from patent trolls? what are you smoking? Have you not seen how patent trolls have, in some cases, gone after customers who were using the software and not the company producing the software. Proprietary software does not protect you from software patents. And as far as the open specifications requirements go, these are public entities and public documentation and services. They have 100% rights to try first and foremost to reduce the per user licensing fees they wou

It's not that the BSA is trying to save money, and avoid unpleasant surprises when patent trolls try to patent something.
It's about the BSA making money. If you ever tried to buy a BSA Standard, you'll know just what I'm talking about.
What is a standard? It is a set of "common sense" collaboration of best practices. If it is created by 50 people who all want to make a standard, and they decide to GIVE it away, then simply put a GPL or GNU license on it.
In the doctrine of full disclosure, I'm a publi

Yet most of their letter is raising the spectre of problems that may or may not exist. Most of their letter is a red herring.

BSA: Open standards don't require patents which kill innovations. Without people being paid for patents, innovations would never happen.FSF: The Internet is an example of an open standard that has helped innovation. The World Wide Web is another.

BSA: Open standards are in opposition to community (European) standards. FRAND is compatible with open source and is compatible with co

First they came for the BSA. I did not speak up because I do not hold any software patents.Then they came for the makers of cellphones and their weird plugs...I did not speak up, because I too was tired of a drawer full of chargers.Then they came for the ISPs promising fast unlimited connections.I did not speak up, because my connection was neither fast or unlimited.

Now they come for some other shyster hiding behind terms and conditions in ambiguous legalese..

When I was listening to that on the radio in it's first broadcast (yes, remember that HHGTTG was first of all a radio series, and it was only the TV series that messed up the colour balance before the books introduced better sound

Well said. Open source software is one thing, but open standards, (especially when it comes to hardware) is so critical in saving billions of pounds from the scourge of UWS (Unnecessary Work Syndrome).

I feel that we're 'lucky' to have say, USB as a standard in connectors. It saves an untold amount of time, development and hassle. I think very long and hard before I buy a device these days which doesn't support charging through USB.

I just wish they'd settle on a particular standard. My old Razr used mini-USB and my Nexus One uses a micro-USB connector, and I've seen ones that use other designs as well. Still better since they frequently package the adapter as a generic USB transformer plus a USB cable of the appropriate type.

micro-USB will be a EU standard in January and it seems this is not just a dead-letter law: All major phone manufacturers have already agreed to go along. EU is a market of half a billion people so in practice this _will_ be a global standard, unless some other major market area starts to actively fight this by standardizing on something else.

Taiwan passed the same law a few years ago, because Asians go thru phones like shoes they had stacks and stacks of old chargers and wanted it to end a while ago. The side effect is that all the Taiwanese OEMS have had to switch over anyway and they're not going to make something "just" for export outside Asia, that would be a joke.

I use the regular cable that came with my iPhone (which has the 30 pin dock connector on one end and a USB connector on the other) and use it with a cheap generic USB charger (a transformer with a USB port on it) when I'm away from home. It also charges from any USB port I plug it into on any computer I have used. I charge it sometimes from a friend's Dell laptop (which does not have any Apple software installed at all [iTunes/Quicktime etc]) and from the USB port on my car

What connector? The USB connector?
I use the regular cable that came with my iPhone (which has the 30 pin dock connector on one end and a USB connector on the other)

He "probably" means the Apple, propriety non-usb end of the connector cable, also the system for connecting any other device to almost any iPod, not the actual device that takes electricity and puts it into a female connector that accepts a male usb inserter: you know, since almost everyone calls the cable that comes with iPods "the charger".

it has a circuit that really wants up to a whole 1000mA. If the charger won't respond to the signal, then the iDevice stays in "trickle" mode.

It's one of those things that is technically "standard" as USB is only SUPPOSED to provide 500mA max (so you don't fry the motherboard), but Apple calibrates EVERYTHING (even the ports on their laptops) to stick strictly to the standard, but then allows their OWN stuff to cheat with a bit of wiring. Motorola phones do the same thing too, even though they have a proper

because most modern WinPCs allow USB to take up to 1000mA now, as long as they don't overload things. Of course that also causes goofy issues on "whitebox" machines because people that buy cheap hardware don't realize what's going on. I have machines a few years old that won't charge an iPod because the iTunes software was needed to trick the USB into allowing the higher amps for iPods to charge, it was a real problem, but everybody basically set all their ports for Apple's little trick and moved on.

There is a 'trick' to it, but it's more of a hack around USB's limitations than an explicit lockdown ploy by Apple. There's not a cryptographic lockout chip in the Apple chargers or anything. They signal the charge current (as high as 1-2A, while the USB spec only allows 500mA) by tweaking the pull-up resistor values on the D+/D- lines which ordinarily allow the host to identify lo/full/hi speed devices.

If you have an older/unofficial/DIY charger which shows 'Unsupported', you can add 4 ordinary resistors t

As I have gotten older I have lost a lot of interest in Open Source. Seeing it as Astroturf solution to the real problem that specifications need to more open. Source Code isn't really that valuable, the Specification and architecture are. Having the source in time you can come up with the architecture and specifications (if the code is reasonable) however that is the long way around.When making applications that can talk to each other and share data open specifications are key.I Personally don't care for

And as I've gotten older, my interest in and support for Free/Libre/Open Source has only grown, but my interest in and support for open standards has grown even faster. Thus, ultimately, we agree on the extreme importance of open standards (and the inherent wrongness of the BSA's position on this matter) despite the fact that our opinions on FLOSS are moving in different directions.:)

that a specification...is only fully open if "the specification can be freely implemented and shared under different software development approaches."

That doesn't mean only open source can participate, it means if you're not willing to waive your patent protections your products can't be included in the specs. There's nothing in the rule that prevents closed source from participating except their own short-sighted greed.

Wow, talk about a sense of entitlement. Change the rules so we can play the way we want to or we're going to take our toys and go home.

Any royalty above zero is inherently discriminatory against small companies and startups. The FSF correctly point out that the amount of capital needed to start a software company is very small, so having to pay a royalty on top of that significantly increases the amount of capital needed. This is just an attempt by large companies to maintain their monopolies and prevent competition from even entering the playing field.

[...]Any royalty above zero is inherently discriminatory against small companies and startups. The FSF correctly point out that the amount of capital needed to start a software company is very small[...]

Did they? My experience tells me it takes a lot more capital and resources to make good software than what most, especially small, companies invest. Not the point, I know, but I feel that's a grossly misleading claim.

So you are trying to say a company made up of a sole developer cannot make good software? The capital requirement in those scenarios is likely zero as the person that goes this route is likely developing at home, off hours from his "real" job, already has a computer and perhaps the only additional expense is keeping the lights and computer on longer. I also know of a few 2 and 3 person companies that perform in exactly the same manner. So your claim of it being a "grossly misleading claim" is exactly tha

One person companies, maybe. There's more additional cost than you're listing, but overall, you may be right.
But most commercial software projects take more manpower than one or two or three developers can accomplish, and then you will need a project manager to coordinate them. That's where small companies often fail, just by not being willing to invest in one who actually has any clue about management.

Compare the amount of usefulness per dollar input versus people that buy boxed solutions? That's the real measure, yes there is big money there, but could you find a Software Company that could do the same thing with the same funds for the same Quality? There's a reason big software companies are willing to throw Apache and Linux developers big money because no single one of those companies could do ALL of what the big OSS projects do in their own house... and they definitely couldn't do it for the amount

Lets hope their letter is already correctly tagged "-1 Troll" in EU parliament. Actually BSA has positive side-effect in Europe. Many people, like me, entered politics thanks to assholes like them. I joined Green Party to fight this scum and actually find out that IT-aware "departments" of political parties are quite small, so few informed people can influence not only party politics but also government (if/when that party is in government). Look at German greens, there popularity is skyrocketing. I bet quite few percent are young people pissed by Internet and free SW restricting lobbyist groups. Especially BSA.

The BSA, just as their brethren the RIAA and MPAA, lie and deceive to press their clients' agenda. Open standards are to the benefit of all and that should be clear and easy to see for even the uninitiated. Open standards are very similar to units of measure in this respect and we can all imagine what things would be like if we didn't operate from the same ones... even worse if a third party controlled the meaning and use of those standards of measure. (weak analogy, I know, but easy enough for the layman to understand)

ISO standards are in principle open as well (well, they more or less were until Microsoft showed us just how easy it is to bribe leadership, but I digress). Following the BSA logic, this should prevent competition.

Just how many different makes of child seats are there? Should we stop this too? And the checking of how secure they are according to OPEN specifications that can be validated for quality?

These people are *so* blinded by their desire for control that they don't just ignore the collateral damage they cause, they actively don't care. Let's give them the benefit of their idea of "innovation" and send them to live in caves to write their next memo on a stone with a blunt chisel.

If this is their stance, are we not talking about cartel building? With this sort of letter I would be most curious to know just what other actions have taken place behind the scenes to make that BSA stance reality. Or, in plain English: maybe an anti-trust investigation could well be in order..

Open standards are used in practically all industries. Perhaps, the most fundamental is units and measure. While the US differs than the rest of the world in the system that it uses, everyone can agree that everyone using the same definition of "liter" is beneficial. The Internet would have never become what it is if royalties were charged every time someone wanted to send a packet of data whether it was email or web or ftp.

The BSA is a sponsored organization - sponsored by payments from commercial software makers. It works on their behalf and in their interests. The BSA also allows the commercial software makers to avoid getting their company shown in a negative light as they fight against anything that would reduce profits for the sponsor companies.

Open formats reduce profits for commercial software companies because we (our governments) don't need to pay for expensive "consultants" to create integrations. Integrations are where the consulting cash rolls in. Special requests that can be sold over and over again are another way they make money. With free software and open file formats, customers can most easily switch between different softwares and use different vendors against each other. With closed formats, only 1 software can work with the data. That is want the commercial software vendor wants everyone to believe.

The main issue with open specifications is they don't mandate open file/data formats. That means the details of the implementation can be interpreted by different vendors in very different ways, while still complying with the spec. That basically makes each implementation proprietary and achieves what the commercial software makers want.

That is not a way for governments - and all of us - to get what we really want.

I'm as anti-BSA as one can be without being someone like RMS, but...just playing DA here...profit means a company stays alive longer, which means stability, which means cost-savings of not having to rework everything and retrain everyone...

now, in an ideal world one would be using open standards so that wouldn't be a problem in the first place...

As an end user and computer user I do not want my data held hostage nor do I want what I can do to be more productive with computer, to be falsely constrained.I am also very aware just how much the software industry in general applies such hostage situations and false constraints. Open source software has proven itself, the developers of, to be a large improvement in teh direction of users freedom but there is plenty to improve upon, such a development tools and methodologies which allow more end users to a

It is fair to point out that the BSA and its member companies operate under an entirely different view of the world than you or I do. In their view of the world, there are two disjoint sets of people: developers, and end users. Developers write software, and end users pay developers to use the software. If a particular team of developers created some software package, the end users are supposed to get their software from that particular team, on whatever terms that team mandates. Open source fits into this by simply allowing lots of developers to collaborate; there is still supposed to be a partition of users and developers.

The BSA folk have trouble with the very concept of libre software; it is a case of "not getting it." The idea that users can share software with each other is foreign to these people, and it goes against everything they believe is true of software development. They have an easier time with "open source," since at least they can still categorize people in a way that is comfortable to them; but when it comes to software freedom, when it comes to actually prioritizing the rights of non-developers, they have trouble with the very concept. "Open source" is something the BSA can compete with, attack, and so forth, because they can wrap their minds around it; "free software," on the other hand, is too different from the world as they understand it, and the best they can do is write it off as "academic."

BSA's Raison d'être is to enforce compliance with commercial software licenses. If all of it's member companies switched to an Open Source model and charged for support, the BSA would still argue against it internally and externally because in that world the BSA is meaningless.

The BSA folk have trouble with the very concept of libre software [...] They have an easier time with "open source"

I suspect they will have a hard time articulating the differences.

If you want to know what they are, look at the two definitions, by the FSF and OSI, respectively, and compare. They are very minor.

IIRC, the TeX license is open source but not free software, because it places a restriction on the naming of changed files in redistributed derived works. That's the only example I know. (IANAL, TINLA)

The differences are not just in the licensing; there is a broad difference in the philosophy of the two movements. The open source movement is about software development, and the free software movement is about the freedom of software users.

A good example of the difference is the TiVo issue. For someone who follows the free software philosophy, what TiVo did was wrong; TiVo prevented users from hacking their own devices. On the other hand, there is nothing specifically wrong about TiVo from an open so

Sometimes I want to stand out of the way and just watch the patent trolls nuke each other out of existence a la Microsoft-Apple-Motorola. While they are busy squabbling like children in a school yard, the free software movement can take the time to do reverse FUD. The Free Software boulder has already begun rolling full steam ahead and I believe there is little anyone can do to quash it! Even if some of of these lizards manage to get a some new closed stuff standardized, free software will simply write a

In its letter, the BSA argues that "[I]f the EU adopts a preference for royalty/patent-free specifications, this undermines the incentives that firms have to contribute leading-edge innovations to standardization - resulting in less innovative European specifications, and less competitive European products."

Firms not contributing to standardization will face being irrelevant! Any firm that does not want to contribute to standardization faces less name recognition as well. Had Microsoft opened its Active Directory protocols from the beginning and sought to make it a standard, all kinds of other products with full compatibility would have been produced and Microsoft would be seen as the reference implementation. Microsoft could have charged large amounts of money for developer support and still

Florian Mueller is a professional PR man, advocate of Orwellian-named (F)RAND licensing and OOXML. In case anybody here doesn't know (unlikely), OOXML is Microsoft's misleadingly-named attempt to lock in the world's official documents. The fight against it was the good fight; only the most deluded and the paid disagree. Florian is the "corporate stooge" here.

He is not a friend of FOSS. He is a paid advocate for Microsoft's and the BSA's policy goals.

Never too late to change, Florian. Tell everyone who you work for, call off the mod brigade, do something good. This is not an abstract or esoteric debate to most of us here, it affects our lives directly. Leave the technology policy to us, go play soccer or something.

That posting asserts all sorts of things without any basis. To give just one example (this is too unreasonable to comment on every aspect of it), I've never advocated OOXML in any way and as far as FRAND is concerned, I've always made it clear that it's not my first choice.

Ah yes, you're not advocating OOXML, you're just suggesting that unencumbered document formats are an IBM conspiracy. And oh how you wish there was a better way than RAND! But there isn't, so the best thing for us to do is sign licensing agreements with Novell, Oracle, and Microsoft.

Since it's all too unreasonable to comment on, just address one point: Categorically deny that you are being paid for this PR campaign, and that your posts and the the obscene moderation thereof are part of said campaign (not that I have any hope for an honest answer).

A concern troll is a false flag [wikipedia.org] pseudonym created by a user whose actual point of view is opposed to the one that the user claims to hold. The concern troll posts in web forums devoted to its declared point of view and attempts to sway the group's actions or opinions while claiming to share their goals [wikipedia.org], but with professed "concerns". The goal is to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt [wikipedia.org] within the group.

TurboHercules asked to license IBM's OSes for production use on an emulator running on unspecified hardware. IBM's main selling point for those systems is extreme reliability. Did IBM ever raise so much as a mild objection to Hercules themselves? Not that I can see. "We think [...] you will understand that IBM could not reasonably be expected to license its operating systems for use on infringing platforms" is as far as they go, even when prompted on th

Oracle dismissing LibreOffice folks is pretty much what anyone else would do in their shoes. Let's say you have a project X. Some people with relatively less power in your project fork it to project Y, and say they do it because project X sucks. What would you do? Still keep them in project X? Replace X with an organization you head, and this will make more sense.
This is the definition of conflict of interest, and the outcome is exactly what happens in such a case.

This discussion is about open standards. And whoever is pushing the open standards (no, it doesn't matter a jot whether it's big blue, redhat, google and what ethical issues they may have or even if they implement the standards properly) the BSA's move here is unethical and just plain wrong.

And please don't mention OOXML opposition in the same... universe as money and corruption when we all saw how that utter abortion of a non-standard was pushed through.

Good points, but there may be some cases where a file format is actually patented (despite exclusions in patent law).

In that particular situation, I think the EU should actually do what the BSA letter suggests, and refrain from using that particular technology for its public standards. In the probably most relevant field for government bureaucracies, formats for office documents, there is already a good enough open standard in the form of ODF.

Veering sadly off-topic here (but I can afford the potential karma hit): if "America" is not the US, then what is it? There's no continent with that name. There's a continent named "North America" and another one named "South America, and collectively they are referred to as "the Americas" (note plural), but nothing on this Earth is simply named "America".

Using "America" to refer to the US may not be 100% unambiguous, but that's only because of a tiny percentage of idiots in North and South America who fo